Developing a B2B Content Strategy: Start with Who

Businesses that want to create long-term sustainable growth will be increasingly moving towards connected company status. That is the place where being social benefits the business by providing insights, strengthening relationships with partners and customers, and building and connecting a community with common grounds and needs.

In many organizations, the listening post resides within the marketing group. As we discussed yesterday here and on Twitter, customer service should co-own the space and collaborate to develop big ears during customer conversations and interactions. In many B2B organizations, the customer support role is much expanded and works hand in hand with operations.

Why are there so few B2B social media case studies?

Because for B2B companies to succeed in becoming social and gaining benefits from doing so, it is imperative for the whole business to join in. It's not about selling more widgets, it's about making an organizations that delivers services the customer wants and needs. Product development, alongside operations - how a solution is born and how it's delivered - and what we learn in between need to be part of it.

In today's competitive environment, the best way to stay ahead is to adapt and evolve, using your experience and processes to serve customers better, more efficiently, and where it fits them like a glove.

If your audience is made of engineers who grew up building systems for the Army, your content needs to match their needs. The only way to do that is for engineers and development professionals to author and socialize it. B2B organizations also have a longer sales cycle and usually a bigger decision-making team. You'll be well served by involving their peers in your company.

Thus, in addition to knowing why, which we touched upon, your B2B content strategy starts with who.

What's the role of marketing?

As a B2B marketer you get to focus on what makes sense for your brand, the context that you should be looking to build, find, and curate for the organization. In thinking again about new media equity only two days ago, I cannot help but agree with what Ben Malbon puts forth in his post on adaptive brand marketing.

• put customer intelligence at the center - this needs to be holistic learning, not just quantitative research. That's the beauty of interaction.

• be the catalyst for change in the organization - this is where marketing understands what creates demand from community building, and what engagement results from editorial impact to have the right calls to action - internally and externally. We'll expand on this concept in another post.

• become a connected company - it's not just a difference in semantics, Malbon/Andersen call it networked, Forrester in its new report cited calls it federated. To me it's about being connected. Maybe this is a place where HR wants to join the conversation. Connected is at all levels, in different ways. We'll take a look at what that means internally in another post.

• think of brand leaders as creators, facilitators, and curators - call me biased, or maybe I just love my work so much that I see the role as expanded. Planning, integrating and building upon participation are also content. The key here will be sustaining the online presence over time. By online I mean active on whichever platform evolves.

• reframe investment time lines - I like this thought a lot. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes given the fluidity of business and the fact that not all opportunities have equal weight. If brand is the infrastructure upon which you build applications like sales and product development, then conversations around a specific solution can be investment in one stock. Think with me about agile measurement with Tim Malbon.

• learn by doing and fail fast - practical person that I am, I crack a book open and I'm already looking at how the idea tests in my work. This point will make many perfectionists bristle. Engineers will not like it one bit. That's why it's the privilege of the marketing team to experience it first hand. Personally, I think we can learn more from failure than from success.

This means that in order to develop a B2B content strategy, the marketer also becomes coach and counselor within the business.

There are plenty of reason why this won't work for a long time - hence the lack of B2B (real) social case studies. Edward Boches nails the obvious ones and I'll let the agency side make the comment for me - politics, budgets, questions about who gets credit abound, he writes. As he continues, he lists a few thoughts that make a lot of sense to me, so much so that I inserted why:

1. Bake the brand story into the product - we buy on the basis of emotional connection. Yes, even in B2B and with large budgets. We rationalize later with fact. The decision is from connection.

2. Embrace the consumer’s desire to participate and allow them to co-create - this can be very simple, listen for the second answer. If you're working on a testimonial or case history, find their story and tell it so they can share it with their teams and peers.

3. Forget about one size fits all: watch Gladwell on Ted.com re spaghetti sauce and realize that customization and versions are the way to go - service is all about custom attention. You're not redoing stuff, you're doing it so it wires with the person/company.

4. Understand that one of your most important products is your content that lives in the social media space - real engagement in fact often begins when you're gone, when you let it go.

5. Build more UX into everything, not just websites, but every encounter with the brand - not just Company online properties, or even sites for that matter, but every single intraction with someone or something representing your brand.

6. Understand your consumer’s relationship not only with you and your category but with media and content and let that inform how you engage - context is very important to understand when thinking about the value your deliver.

There's a role for the Conversation Agent in all this. Agencies will also need to come to the table as marketing partners when they've learned to understand the client's business. Partners and not proxies. The connected company is involved and evolved with the marketplace directly - it intends to create with it.

Are you developing a B2B content strategy? What's working and what can use a tune up? How are you going about identifying and enrolling a cross functional team?

[image by Pieter Musterd]

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Additional resources:

Writing Content for the Buyer's Decision Journey

Top Ten Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Fails

How Big Brands can Start Testing Social Media

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Brad Schwarzenbach]

Valeria,

I really like your model for this, especially marketer as internal communications facilitator.

They are in the best position to help craft and guide the participation of people within different business disciplines.

Thanks for the insight!

Brad

[Nathan Hangen]

I think this is great, but what about those of us trying to evangelize this message? What does it take to convince a company to adopt a policy like this and how do they get started if they don't have the framework?

I think the person that figures this out might just be a modern day messiah.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Brad - more than internal communications I see the marketer as strategist and curator, with the opportunity to connect the dots on how the organization comes across in the marketplace. Today, this is a very dynamic and adaptive role with intelligence and situational awareness as the GPS.

@Nathan - glad you asked that. Next week at BlogWell Atlanta, I will be presenting a case study of how a B2B company is building social media content capabilities from executive buy in to building a team of contributors from a framework constructed through public relations and internal communications.

[Jay Baer]

Excellent post. I also believe one reason why there aren't many B2B social media case studies is B2B's hyper-competitive nature. With high dollar considered purchases, most B2B companies are not eager to share their social media "secret sauce" with competitors at conferences, or via blog posts.

At events, I've spoken with tons of B2B marketers doing amazing social media initiatives, but the story never gets told.

The big takeaway above is that social media impacts the whole company. It's not about social marketing, it's about BEING social. That has corporate culture ramifications. Staffing ramifications. Operations ramifications. Customer service ramifications. And a lot more.

The sooner we realize that social media is led by marketing, but is by no means limited to marketing, the better off we'll be. That's why it doesn't bother me when some companies (B2B more often) are slow to take up the social media reins. I see that as good news.

I agree that we should "learn by doing" but doing before you really believe in the social media big picture leads to one-way Twitter accounts and blogs and Facebook pages and other shiny objects used ineffectively.

[Christina Klenotic]

We're helping our b2b clients assemble cross-functional social media teams that are comprised of communications, marketing, legal, HR and sales professionals to ascertain the strategic direction of the company when it comes to social media. The first step is finding out where conversations are occuring about their brand, product and/or industry and who's participating. Based on a social media audit, we can make recommendations about how social media should be integrated into the company's overall communications strategy.

FYI, for b2b companies in particular, we're finding that engineers use forums to share info and opinions.

[Kipp Bodnar]

Valeria,

I agree a lot with Jay. I think in many ways B2B organizations are ahead of B2C in measuring ROI and tying it to social media.

If you look at what folks like BreakingPoint Systems are doing, it is pretty impressive. I am researched a lot of B2B Social Media examples and sure not all of them are good, but they are moving in the right direction.

It is also important to realize the Social media doens't work in some situations. For example if the decision maker sits behind a secure firewall with no public Internet access.

[Joseph Fiore]

Great post and thanks for sharing these insights Valeria!

Kipp's point on access controls can be a big hurdle to effective and timely social media listening and engagement. If it isn't corporate culture that perpetuates the silos in the enterprise, its stifling policy and mandate.

That said, as a vendor in the listening space, we have seen some improvements that are encouraging and have to agree that things seem to be moving in a positive direction, especially in relation to companies taking action in more coordinated and responsible ways whenever incidents emerge that scrutinize a businesses Google resume.

Joseph
@RepuTrack

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